Advanced Piping

PAID FEATURE: Advanced Piping is only available on some paid plans—see if it’s on your plan.

Advanced Piping lets you insert text like custom variables, custom data from Contacts, or a respondent's answer to a previous question into your survey—allowing you to personalize your survey questions for each unique respondent based on who they are and how they answer certain questions in your survey.

Advanced Piping is related to Question & Answer Piping, which is a simpler version of this feature that only lets you insert text from one data source: previous questions in the survey.

Adding Advanced Piping

To use Advanced Piping:

Click the textbox you want to insert text into. See a list of the supported fields below.

Click Insert text from....

Select a data source from the menu. You can choose from previous questions, contacts, or custom variables.

When you insert text from one of the available data sources into your survey, the following syntax is inserted into the textbox:

{{ expression }}

When a respondent takes your survey, the output of the expression will replace the brackets based on their unique answers, or the custom data or custom variables associated with them.

Supported Fields

You can add Advanced Piping expressions into the following fields in your survey:

Question Text

Answer Choices*

Row Labels

Column Labels

"Other" Textbox Labels

* For Matrix of Dropdown Menus questions, you can't pipe into answer choices (the choices that appears in the dropdown menus).

Available Data Sources

You can reference the following data sources in the Advanced Piping expressions you create.

Some data sources are only supported when you send your survey to respondents through specific collector types, as noted below.

You can't pipe questions into page 1 of a survey, but you can pipe custom data from contacts and custom variables into page 1.

Previewing & Testing Advanced Piping

The best ways to test Advanced Piping before sending your survey to respondents differs depending on the data sources you reference in your Advanced Piping expressions.

Testing Piping Based on Questions

If all of the Advanced Piping in your survey is based on a respondent's answer text, you can preview the survey in the Preview & Score section and test the different survey paths based on which answer choices you select.

When you create a test group, include email addresses that you have access to for testing. When you add custom data to those contacts, make sure that you fill in all the Custom Data fields that you based Advanced Piping on. For example, if you use the Custom 1 field to record each contact's department, and you're piping that information into your survey, make sure to add information into the Custom Data 1 field for your test contact.

If any of your Advanced Piping conditions are based on custom variables, the best way to test your survey is to create a Web Link and edit the variables in the URL to make sure the proper variables are being passed through to your survey.

Survey Behavior

Any expression between double curly brackets is evaluated by Advanced Piping when a respondent takes your survey.

If there is no answer, custom data, or custom variable to replace the template with, the bracketed template is simply replaced by a blank space, so your respondents will never see bracketed templates in your survey.

Analyzing Your Results

In the Analyze Results section, the bracketed Advanced Piping templates appear in the question and answer text just as they do as you're designing your survey. The outputs of Advanced Piping aren't recorded in the Analyze Results section. They're only evaluated on the survey page as a respondent takes the survey—to provide a more custom experience.

You can filter your results by question & answer or respondent metadata, to see how respondent information relates to their responses to the rest of the questions in the survey.